Normally when a 72-year-old wins an Oscar it is a consolation award because they have been previously overlooked for the films that they deserved to win for. But the 1972 Best Foreign Film Oscar this received feels perfectly judged. It is perhaps the film Bunuel is best remembered for, that audiences most enjoy and was a culmination of a life's work. It is a really great title as well.

Bunuel is one of the rare filmmakers who is universally regarded as a Good Thing. Most film directors' life stories are blindingly dull: go to film school, watch a lot of films, make lots of adverts and music vids coping bits from the films seen at film school, sell soul, go to Hollywood and marry hot model turned actress from Eastern Europe. Bunuel had a great life story, working with Dali and founding surrealism, leaving Spain when Franco came in, working in the low budget wilderness for many decades before slowly achieving a position of global acclaim in his sixties and seventies, all topped off with a much-loved autobiography My Last Breath.

I think it helps that while the subject matter is subversive and anarchic, the filmmaking is ploddingly conventional, barely more ambitious than what was happening on Crossroads at the time. His point-and-shoot style means that there were no little stylistic flourishes to date it. He was the ultimate in substance over style and a model of restraint, a quality that is always guaranteed to have film academics wetting themselves. The appeal of Bunuel is his sense of freedom, It is almost punk the idea that you don't need great technical competence to make great films, just imagination and ideas.

Along with its perfect title, it has a perfect plot device: six refined, well to do characters in search of dinner. Every time they gather for a dinner party they are thwarted by circumstance, be it getting the dates wrong, military manoeuvres, getting arrested or finding themselves in the middle of someone's dream sequence. It also has an almost perfect cast that could be a time capsule of a whole era of French performers (Rey, magnificent as the Ambassador for the South American Republic of Miranda, is Spanish.)

The film is sophisticated, polished and charmingly elusive, and I don't know if that's praise or criticism. The six characters are all fairly monstrous – they are connected by the three men's business smuggling cocaine using Rey's diplomatic immunity - but there's something very tame about the film. Forty years earlier with Dali, he was making films so savage and shocking (Un Chien Andalou, L'Age D'Or) it seemed society may not be able to hold them. Here he seems to be gently tickling the sensibilities of those that he is condemning.